Negotiators confirm ACTA not really a “counterfeiting” treaty

At a rare on-the-record luncheon in Washington yesterday, the top EU …

What's in a name? Not much, when it comes to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As Luc Devigne, the top EU negotiator on ACTA made clear today, he has no intention of limiting ACTA to, you know, its name.

ACTA negotiators gathered today for an informal luncheon at which some outsiders were invited, including several civil society folks. According to American University's Mike Palmedo, who attended the DC event and took notes later sent to Ars, "[Devine] asked more than once how you could have an 'IP Enforcement' treaty and not include patents—and dismissed suggestions that ACTA was specifically an 'Anti-Counterfeiting' treaty rather than a broader enforcement treaty." (Australia still objects strongly to including patents in ACTA, but the EU wants them included.)

But perhaps the strangest moment of the luncheon came when the civil society advocates dropped by a table of South Korean negotiators. The Americans asked how ACTA was playing among civil society groups back in Korea.

"When asked what Korean civil society was pushing for, the answer was quite different than what we expected," said Palmedo. "There has been some pressure in Korea for the inclusion of 'morality on the Internet' provisions following a string a scandals in Korea involving celebrity suicides linked to gossipy Internet slander."

Make of that what you will. Our take: turning a limited trade agreement on counterfeiting into a broad-based "IP Enforcement" treaty is worrisome enough, but such worries would be far eclipsed by any attempt to write vague pronouncements about "Internet morality" into the text. We don't expect it to happen, and the Koreans did not indicate their own support for the idea.

The final item of note: at least some lead negotiators want to open the ACTA draft text to more scrutiny. The EU's Devigne and Australia's George Mina, speaking personally rather than officially, indicated that after this week's meeting in Washington, "they didn’t see why the text shouldn’t be released if it’s just going to be leaked anyway."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of transparency, that, but at least they get credit for bowing to pragmatism if not principle.

After this week's meeting, at which negotiators will try to lock down all the "easy" issues, another round of talks will take place in Japan in September.